A History of the World (13 page)

The Greeks, who were fascinated by Cyrus and his descendants, believed that the Persians were simply more open than other people to foreign influences. There are suggestions that, because they were originally nomadic barbarians, they advanced in civilization by taking in and digesting the architecture, clothes, war technologies and gods of longer-settled people. But history offers plenty of examples of barbarian invaders who simply burn, oppress, and move on. The Greeks were trying to understand one of the mysteries of Iron Age history – how it was that an obscure tribal people suddenly erupted across Asia and built, and sustained, the greatest empire yet known. However, unlike the Jews, the Greeks misunderstood Cyrus.

Well aware that his Persians were a small minority taking power over many ancient and once-powerful civilizations, Cyrus had found a new way of governing. Under him, so long as you did not rebel, you had freedom of worship and custom. This was the first multicultural empire. But that did not make it less warlike or ruthless in repressing its enemies. Cyrus II was almost constantly at war with someone, and though he built a famously lovely capital, with huge, carefully planted gardens called
paradeiza
(hence our ‘paradise’), most accounts say he died as he had lived, fighting. The most colourful account says he was fighting a fierce tribe led by a female ruler called Tomyris, in today’s Kazakhstan; he had won one battle by tricking them into getting drunk on unfamiliar alcohol, but Tomyris had her revenge, leading her
troops for a second attack in one of the fiercest fights of ancient times, after which Cyrus was decapitated. His body was returned to Pasar-gadae, where his impressively stark limestone tomb still stands.

This story comes from the ‘father of history’, also labelled ‘the father of lies’ by later jealous rivals, Herodotus. He probably visited Babylon, searching for information about his life’s work, the history of the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians. A gripping writer and a great storyteller, Herodotus tried his best to get first-hand information, and certainly travelled widely in the ancient world, but he also had the fatal journalist’s enthusiasm for a ripping yarn. He never even tried to be drily factual. He lived in a world which was god-haunted, superstitious and credulous – even more so than ours – at a time of oracles and vengeful deities. He may not tell us what really happened, and he is famously useless on causation; but Herodotus does tell us what the people on the street, and in the villages, thought had happened, and why.

Herodotus says Cyrus was the grandson of the King of the Medes, Astyages, which is probably true. He also says that Grandpa Astyages had a dream in which his daughter ‘made water in such enormous quantities that it filled his city and swamped the whole of Asia’.
¹¹
This somewhat indecorous behaviour was interpreted to mean that there was trouble ahead, so Astyages married her off to a quiet, dull man called Cambyses. She became pregnant. Old Astyages had another dream, this time that a huge vine grew out of his daughter’s vagina and spread across Asia. Dr Freud being unavailable, the Magi interpreted this as meaning that Astyages’ grandson would usurp the throne. So orders were given to have the baby boy taken away and killed.

The servant could not face doing this, and passed the job to a poor herdsman and his wife, who brought the boy up as their own. When he was ten, Cyrus was playing a game called ‘kings’ in a village street with other boys, and his behaviour was so noble that the trick was suspected. The servant who had failed to kill off the baby was rewarded by having his own son casseroled and served up to him. On the advice of the Magi, Astyages spared Cyrus; Cyrus then led a revolt by Persian soldiers against the king, and though Astyages impaled the Magi for getting things so wrong (quite rightly, it has to be said), he was duly overthrown.

Cyrus treated his murderous grandfather with great consideration and allowed him to stay at court until he died. Though clearly a mixture of prurient gossip and traditional mythic storytelling, Herodotus’ account points to a truth about the historical Cyrus, or at least how he was perceived in the markets and byways where the historian listened and took notes. Cyrus was a strange mix of the ruthless and the tolerant, who came from an old line of warrior-rulers and for whom both lineage and authority were problematical. As a fighter, he combined troops from different peoples, introducing tactical innovations from across Asia to win spectacular victories.

One of the most famous was over King Croesus of Lydia, in what is today western Turkey. The Lydians were well known to the Greeks; Herodotus says they invented gold and silver coinage. It was certainly reliable. In Lydia, the river that contained substantial amounts of ore still runs past the archaeological remains of a very early mint, where the metal was refined and the coins stamped. Lydian-style coins, whose great merit was that their weight, purity and therefore value were accepted far beyond the small state itself, provided a monetary system imported by Cyrus into his empire. Currency became current in Asia thanks to Cyrus’s war.

Herodotus also says that Solon, who composed the first unified law system for classical Athens, visited Lydia and warned Croesus that he could not be called happy until he was dead, because one never knew what might happen next. When Croesus was waiting to be executed on a pyre of wood, he told the Persian king about Solon’s words. Cyrus thought of his own case, and relented, keeping Croesus as a prisoner and adviser. When he asked the defeated Lydian whether he had actively wanted war, Croesus replied with perhaps the most famous sentence Herodotus ever scratched down: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.’

Herodotus’ interest in Persian culture, shared by other Greek writers, was practical and urgent. Had Cyrus, and the great kings who followed him, solved the problem of how to rule well? They had created an empire linked by fast, straight roads and governed by local administrators, or satraps; their tolerance of local religious customs allowed them to rule without an oppressively large force, and they seemed remarkably open to other people’s ideas. Their armies were
huge and composed of many different peoples; their main cities were impressive.

Herodotus notes that the people kiss when they meet in the street, rather than speaking, and he admires the custom whereby even the king refrains from putting someone to death for a single offence. They abhor lies and debt. They never pollute rivers ‘with urine or spittle’, or even wash their hands in the water they use to drink. They have an interesting way of taking decisions:

This system too has lasted: it is widely practised in the British democracy at Westminster. The Persians were clearly an impressive people, to be learned from as well as feared.

The Greek Miracle

We last left the Greek world itself scattered and emigrant, settlers amid the ruins of their first civilization, listening to Homeric tales of the age of heroes. Between about 800 and 550
BC
the Greek story was one of gradual revival, based on their distinctive communities called
poleis
(singular:
polis
, which we normally translate as city-state). These varied greatly in size. Athens was a rare example of a survival from the Bronze Age, which had lost her hegemony over the surrounding area but regained it to become the largest of these city-states. Most examples of the
polis
tended to involve one easily defended high point, or acropolis, with a town around it and then villages and agricultural land around that. Other rural Greeks remained in their
ethnos
, or clan.

The earliest towns were hardly defended; later, stone walls and fortified gates appeared, to protect them not against Persians but against other Greeks. Up to nine in ten ancient Greeks were farmers, working relatively poor soil and struggling with the early effects of deforestation. They relied on wood and charcoal for fuel, and timber for
house-beams and ships, but from early on, having hacked back the relatively sparse forests climbing the mountains of their archipelago, they had to import from the Black Sea and Asia. They ate little meat, keeping goats and sheep mainly for clothing and milk, and depended heavily on barley, wheat, olives, grapes and figs: beer-drinkers, like the Egyptians, were regarded as rather odd. The Mediterranean diet was established early.

The geography of Greece was crucial to the development of this civilization. Lots of sharp-ridged ranges running down to the sea created separate city-states growing independent of one another, likely to experiment in different ways of running their affairs. These early states were not egalitarian, like the first Anatolian towns. Most had developed from semi-tribal groups run by warrior-aristocrats, who owned most of the land and wealth. This continued even when the Greeks became more urban and republican in their government; as late as the golden age of Athens, the state was riven by deep class conflicts, wealthy nobles being resented by the rest.

However – to simplify a much more complicated story – the aristocrats steadily lost political ground as urban life became more important. They lost out first to ‘tyrants’, an Asian word which really meant ‘usurpers’, taking over sole control of a state. Then they started to lose ground to group decisions made by ordinary citizens, often meeting as families or tribes. By the seventh–sixth century
BC
, the Greeks had a complicated religious pantheon comprising both the ‘family’ of Olympian gods that had probably been brought down by the first Aryan invaders, and local cults. They shared a language, though found it hard to understand some of the rival dialects. They were also divided by culture, the Greeks who lived on the Asian coast being richer and perhaps softer than the western Greeks of the Peloponnese.

The most important early development came about through their method of fighting. In the seventh century
BC
the Greeks had mastered the skill of fighting on foot in tightly organized phalanxes of soldiers, each carrying a large shield to protect the man to his left, and charging with spears, switching to swords for close fighting. From this two things followed. First, it required general discipline and mutual trust, virtues developed in the
polis
. Second, it meant that anyone who could afford the basic equipment – a bronze helmet, greaves, shield
and spear – was a useful fighter. This included small-time farmers as well as craftsmen and tradesmen. The old dominance of small numbers of aristocratic cavalry, all set to protect their patch, was trumped by common men fighting together. The political implications hardly need to be spelled out: one historian says that, without this development, ‘nobody would have dared kill off their community’s main fighting force, the nobility’.
¹²

Why did it happen? Greek terrain, with its narrow valleys and mountainous gorges, was not particularly suited to horse warfare, and certainly not to the fleets of chariots favoured in Asia. You could hardly even start a charge across Attica without instantly tumbling head over heels or losing your wheels. It was not a landscape made for emperors, any more than is Switzerland or Afghanistan. Later, a similar extension of people-power would emerge at sea, as the Greek states developed navies of war galleys that needed to be rowed by disciplined and experienced men working in perfect unison. This time the recruits came from those too poor to kit themselves out as hoplite warriors on land. So a common feeling stemming from a shared headquarters and familiar geography was fortified by the act of fighting together – and, soon, by a common enemy. Solidarity started in warfare.

Apart from religious ideas and languages, not to mention the Homeric stories, the Greeks shared an enthusiasm for athletics, prepared for naked in gymnasiums. All-Greece games, contests in music and fighting as well as racing, were an early way of binding Greeks together. Since each city-state had a different calendar including different start times for each year, the games became a crucial way of measuring dates and timespans: the names of the winners of every Olympic Games since (allegedly) 776
BC
became their version of our numerical counting of ‘2012’ or ‘1945’. The gymnasia, where men went oiled and naked, produced a strong culture of homosexual admiration, and love affairs between boys and older men.

These are the early distinctive signs of Greek culture, but they emphatically did not lead to all these city-states developing a single answer to ruling and to the problem of power. Political competition turned the Greeks into historians and philosophers. One of the more extreme political systems, and a challenge to other states, was that of the Spartans. Though Pheidon of Argos is supposed to have
introduced the tactic of phalanx fighting around 670
BC
, it did not become a Spartan obsession until they had been beaten in battle by the men of Argos. The Spartans were already a warrior people, who had subdued a semi-enslaved landscape of farmers and helots (or serfs), as well as subsidiary villages who produced the food that allowed them to concentrate on their overriding hobby and interest – war.

The Spartans developed a state, with pre-echoes of Samurai Japan, or Facism, which self-consciously rejected the nurturing of the gentler arts being enjoyed in other Greek states. Babies judged weak-looking were left out to die. Boys and girls were separated at the age of seven. Boys were brought up in military-style training camps and later sent out to steal and kill food for themselves. Girls, too, were made to run and wrestle naked; later on, any one of them might provide a wife to be shared by several Spartan-citizen brothers. Spartans who fought and lost often killed themselves. The Spartans had two kings at any one time and a senior council of men aged sixty and over, who would put their proposals to all-male meetings of citizens.